This paper reviews recent work on macroeconomic management with varying organization of wage/price bargaining and degrees of credible monetary conservatism. The emerging literature synthesizes and extends theory and empirics on central bank independence (CBI) and coordinated wage/price...

Plans for European Monetary Union are based on the conventional postulate that increasing the independence of the central bank can reduce inflation without any real economic effects. However, the theoretical and empirical bases for this claim rest onmodels of the economy that make unrealistic...

In the postwar era until recently, public-transfer shares of GDP have risen dramatically in every developed democracy. Much positive theory purports to explain this development as a direct consequence of differing distributions of political (votes) and economic (money) resources. This literature...

The volume of theoretical literature seeking to explain public-debt accumulation has exploded in recent years as debt crises have emerged in many nations. However, empirical evaluation of political-economy theories has, unfortunately, lagged somewhat that of the standard...

Much recent research in political economy has focused on how globalization might affect the politics of institutional and policy choice. Research examining whether globalization will contribute to convergence of national institutional arrangements or policies is the preeminent example. In this...

Central to recent debates about international cooperation has been the contention that if states seek relative gains, cooperation becomes more difficult. To help revive and redirect the debate, we provide a general treatment of the relative-gains argument in the simplest possible formal terms....

Theorists have long argued that democratic policymakers respond to political pressures from their constituents. Although empirical work generally supports that broad contention, heterogeneity prevails both in theoretical work and empirically across country-times over exactly what comprises the...

When considering the implications for fiscal-policy outcomes (especially deficits and debts) of the dispersion of policymaking authority across multiple actors, recent veto-actor scholarship has emphasized its potential to privilege the status quo and thus retard policy-adjustment rates. In...